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Talk:Niki No. 41/@comment-4715955-20160710072021
It started punchy enough to pull me in, but then one questionable thing after another started rolling through, forming a giant crushing snowball of "what?". I spent more time questioning the writing than I did immersing myself in the story. "His other eye was bloodshot, flailing at her accusingly." Eyes can't flail. Limbs flail. "Her hips swung to the sides like a Coke bottle" I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The rest of the metaphors in this paragraph work really well, but this one stands out as just being awkward and unclear. It can't be foreshadowing of the "streamlined coke bottles" metaphor late in the story, because it doesn't have enough weight to be considered forshadowing or even thematic. "Yes, well, Mawmaw is a senile bitch who shits in a bag." I had to re-read the story to figure out who Mawmaw was. I first assumed it was the mom, in which case, how the hell old are these two? Is his wife really old enough to be described this way even in jest? Then I thought maybe Callie meant her grandma, but her grandma isn't mentioned in the narrative until later, and she's apparently already dead. This confused the relation to Dan further, because he calls him "Mom's brother-in-law". Does he mean his mom (grandma), or Callie's mom (wifey)? The Dan questions were eventually answered at the funeral, but it was a huge distraction having to re-read everything up to that point because I thought I had missed something. 'the teacher rant' -- It not only goes on too long, but his whole "i pay your salary" thing doesn't even make sense. How is he gonna fire her? By not paying taxes? The dialogue sometimes gets confusing, too, regarding who's speaking: twice I had to stop and re-read the conversation with Brandon at the funeral, because I wasn't sure who was saying what; and again and again with the conversation with his wife, when you keep starting a new paragraph unnecessarily while the wife is still talking. You make sure not to end quotes until these characters are actually done talking, but that's not enough to make it coherent. I have to question a guy's logic when he considers fast food and cigarettes a form of suicide. If it doesn't kill you until you're in your fifties, it kinda defeats the purpose of suicide. Maybe I'm the last person to complain about long build-ups -- my own Carbon River doesn't really get going until 1/3 of the way in -- but nothing unusual or interesting happens in this story until more than halfway through. We don't see any kind of unnatural/horror aspect to the story 'til the very last few pages, and it all comes out of nowhere for the most part, except for a couple of clues that really didn't necessarily imply anything unusual (a prostitute who could have been an orphan, the missing Nikki pretending she didn't know her caller probably 'cos she's hiding out). The only remotely interesting thing about this story was Nikki, and you seem hellbent on spending as little time on her mystery as possible, instead focusing almost exclusively on long, pointless dialogue sequences and hammering home the fact that this guy's life is shitty. I'm sure there are other issues I'm forgetting, but all the above is more than enough. This isn't a scary story, nor a thriller: it is pages and pages of nihilistic moping, and a sprinkling of half-baked mystery that was ultimately disappointing anyway. I was hoping for something otherworldly hiding out in a brothel, or a horrific or otherwise supernatural escort service that would be right at home in Tales from the Crypt. Instead we get The Clonus Not-So-Horror, and even then only in the last four pages. tl;dr: There's simply no reason to read this. Nothing happens 'til the end, and the end is neither scary nor interesting. The protagonist is a whiny loser and possibly retarded, the last person I want to be stuck with for several hundred pages, with the exception of maybe a child molester or TMZ journalist. Next time, start with the mystery, and stick to it. Forget everything else.